The World Wide Web has expanded to provide numerous web services to consumers. The web services may be provided by a web application which uses multiple services and applications to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provide the service more difficult to track and monitor.
Monitoring a web application helps to provide insight regarding bottle necks in communication, communication failures and other information regarding performance of the services that provide the web application. Most application monitoring tools provide a standard report regarding application performance. Though the typical report may be helpful for most users, it may not provide the particular information that an administrator wants to know.
For example, when monitoring a web application, is important to provide as much detail as possible to a system administrator in order to correctly diagnose a problem. In many cases, a performance issue with an application is not due to the application itself, but rather due to a network that processes communications between multiple machines. It is difficult to determine how an application performance is affected by the network when only monitoring the application itself. What is needed is an improved system for monitoring applications that communicate over network.